Home > Western Cree syllabics

Cree syllabics uses different glyphs to indicate consonants, and changes the orientation of these glyphs to indicate the vowel that follows it. The basic principles of Canadian syllabic writing are outlined in the article for Canadian aboriginal syllabic writing.

Western syllabics use only those characters needed to write the phonemes of the western dialects. In this article, Cree words and sounds will transcribed using the Standard Roman Orthography used to teach Plains Cree .

There are four basic vowels in Plains and Swampy Cree: a, i, e and o. The a, i and o sounds also have long versions: â, î and ô. The vowel e is always long and is written as ê. In Woods Cree, ê has merged with î, so only three basic vowels are used in that dialect. Woods Cree also has the phoneme th /ð/ (the th from the English word that). For more on Cree dialects see the article on the Cree language.

Standard Roman Orthography consonants sound for the most part like their English equivalents, except that they are never aspirated. (/p/ sounds like the "p" in "spot", not "pea".) The letter c sounds like the "ts" in "bits". Long vowels can be written either with a macron or a circumflex.

1 Western Cree syllabary

Notes:

[1] The vowel ê is not used in Woods Cree.

[2] th-series only present in Woods Cree.

[3] Woods Cree usually uses a small double dagger (‡) to indicate a final th, but this character is not in the Unicode standard.

[4] A dot following any syllable indicates that the vowel is preceded by a w, which comes before the initial consonant.

[5] hk is a very common consonant cluster at the end of words because it is part of the morpheme used for the locative case. It is used so frequently that it has its own final.

[6] l and r only appear in loan words in western Cree dialects. They may appear before or after a syllable as necessary to indicate the pronunciation of the borrowed word.

Note that the th-series closely resembles the y-series characters. The th phoneme in Woods Cree appears largely in contexts where a y appears in Plains and Swampy Cree. Recongising the relationship between the two sounds, Cree writers use a characters which are almost identical to the y-series.

In addition to these characters, western Cree syllabics indicates the w phoneme by placing a dot after the syllable. Thus, the syllable wa is indicated with ᐘ, pwi by ᐽ and so on. The dot used to mark the w can be combined with the dot marking length. The syllable wâ is marked as ᐚ and pwî as ᐿ. The dot used to indicate w is placed before the syllable in Eastern Cree syllabics . This and the way finals are written are the two principal differences between eastern and western Cree syllabics.

The dot placed above syllables with long vowels is often dropped in real texts unless necessary to disambiguate the word. Long and short vowels may be written identically and require context to diambiguate.

Also, western Cree writers may use the character ᙮ to indicate the end of sentence, instead of the Roman alphabet period so that it is not confused with the diacritic indicating the w sound.

An example of Plains Cree written in western Syllabics:

ᑳᒫᒋᐲᑭᐢᒁᑎᑯᐟ ᐆᐦᐃ ᐅᐢᑳᔭ ᐁᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᔨᐟ᙮ ᒫᑲ ᓇᒨᔭ ᓂᓯᑐᐦᑕᐍᐤ ᐊᐘ ᐅᐢᑭᓂᑮᐢ ᑖᓂᓯ ᐁᐃᑘᔨᐟ ᐋᑕ ᐏᐢᑕ ᐁᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐟ᙮

In Standard Roman Orthography:

Kâ-mâci-pîkiskwâtikot ôhi oskâya ê-nêhiyawêyit. Mâka namôya nisitohtawêw awa oskinikîs tânisi ê-itwêyit âta wîsta ê-nêhiyawêt.

English translation:

The young people then began to speak in the language of his ancestry - Nêhiyawêwin ( Plains Cree language). Unfortunately the young man could not make out what they were saying even though he was of the same nation; Nêhiyaw ( Plains Cree people).

(Example from [1].)